British Agriculture and Food Labelling

There are long rivers in Hampshire. All that takes us into the world of the absurd, and there is a real danger that the discrediting of the labelling process discourages the public from acting ethically, as we desperately need them to. In 2006, the National Consumer Council did a survey called ““Greening Supermarkets””. It found that fresh vegetables labelled as seasonally available in the UK included leeks from Kenya, watercress from the USA, carrots from Egypt and cabbage from South Africa. All that went on behind the guise of misleading labelling. That is what happens when we try to drive changes through a voluntary process. It is a licence to cheat. Supermarkets compete with each other for volume of sales, and when one starts to cheat, the pressure for others to join them increases. We have to engage with the case for mandatory labelling—not only for UK meat, but for UK food produce in general. I want to go on to a second report, about a bigger issue. The Soil Association has just produced ““An inconvenient truth about food””, which takes us into the most difficult and challenging food security issues faced in the UK. Historically, UK Government policy, as espoused by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Treasury, has been fundamentally ill conceived on the issue. The problem goes back not 10 years, but to 1817, when David Ricardo wrote ““Principles of Political Economy and Taxation””. He set out the theory of comparative advantage; the example that he used was the trade between the UK and Portugal. Since then, the UK has hidden behind a presumption that it did not really matter what we produced ourselves, because there would always be plenty of food ““out there””—wherever ““there”” was. Britain was a trading nation, we should make a virtue of that, and if that meant a decline in UK farming and food production, well, ““C'est la vie””. We are now faced with a fundamental change in the economics and politics of world food supply. Since 2006, there has been a steady escalation in global food prices. There have been food riots in 14 countries, from the tortilla riots in Mexico to the pasta protests in Italy. We are seeing a fundamental shift in the notion of food security and self-sufficiency. Even UK supermarkets are starting to acknowledge that they can no longer move their purchasing plans around from country to country, hopping between continents, because of countries' increased reluctance to export food when they cannot feed themselves. Since June 2008, the consequence of that in the UK alone has been an increase in staple food prices of 13.7 per cent. That is felt in the wallets and on the kitchen tables of households across the country. What we are being asked to address as a Parliament, and what the country will have to address, is the word ““resilience””. What food resilience is there in the UK? Resilience means the ability of our country to deal with food shocks and long-term changes in food supply. I want to list the weaknesses in our current position that make us non-resilient. We are massively dependent on nitrogen fertilisers. Last year, we imported 1 million tonnes of nitrogen fertilisers, which are 310 times as damaging to the environment as carbon dioxide. We are heavily dependent in that we do not source our own fertilisers but have to import them from abroad. Sixty-nine per cent. of the pesticides used in the UK were imported from outside. Ninety-five per cent. of UK food is oil-dependent. Most worrying of all is the question of UK soil. Twenty years ago, the country was warned that almost half of the soil in the UK was vulnerable to erosion. The Environment Agency estimated that in the years 1995 to 1998 we lost 2.3 million tonnes of agricultural soil to erosion, directly as a consequence of our reliance on intensive farming. We have at various times discussed in this House our dependence on peak oil, but we have had no discussions on peak food or peak phosphate. Phosphate is a finite mineral resource that will be under huge pressure, given the increasing demands from China and from India. In the past few months, phosphates have increased in price by 700 per cent. to over £185 a tonne. We need to address all those issues when we consider how resilient UK food policy is, even before we begin to build into the equation the role of food and the land in meeting UK carbon emission targets. We need a UK plan for food; what we have at the moment is a million miles from that. We have a policy based on a wing and a prayer. This country, and our future generations, require an awful lot more than that.